You ever have a moment when you just wish you could use a flamethrower on something and not have the police called on you? Yeah, had one of those moments earlier today.

I was writing, as usual, and was moving along at a brisk pace (had written about 4,000 words so far, which is decent) when suddenly my computer crashed. Huh. That’s weird. So I rebooted it and everything came up fine. Bizarre, but nothing is missing, so I opened up my word doc. There’s the autosave version, safe and sound, so I open it. Scroll down to Chapter Three (I’m adding stuff to it today) and begin to continue my description of the alien kraken. I pause, though, when I realized that my preceding 2,000 words for that chapter have disappeared. I open up the saved version I had made before the autosave kicked on and… nothing.

What the hell?

So by now, as you can imagine, I’m swearing like a sailor (I was one, so I should know). I quickly save what I have and try to search and see if it was accidentally saved elsewhere. More swear words (including a few I invented) as I discover that all which remains is my new version. So, instead of a net gain of 5,000 words on Kraken Mare today, it’s a mere 3,000.

I know a lot of people who would be happy to write that much in one day, but I try to hit a goal of 5,000 every day. Bare minimum is 1,000. Losing 40% of the day’s productivity… kinda annoys me. I really, really need to get this book done asap. I don’t have time to futz around with these shenanigans, desktop. I really don’t.

Well, hopefully I’ll sell enough books this year to pick up a laptop to work on at least. I love my desktop computer, but the only thing it’s good at now is running old games (which is still cool, btw) and letting me write.

I commissioned a piece of art with the amazing J. F. Posthumus. I need a book cover for another work loosely based on Boadicea and her near-sacking of Londinium in 60 AD and Jennie already had the base idea of what I wanted, and since Bad Moon Books always goes with her for artwork… yeah, I’m easy. But this cover, this one should make people very, very happy.

Just a brief update. Gotta get this book done. Oh, someone remind me that I’m up at the Mad Genius Club this Friday. Going to write about a topic that quite a few people celebrate, but not everyone is happy about it. See if you can figure it out by this Friday.